Inside Abby Aldrich Rockefeller's Wondrous Maine Garden

The Asian-inspired garden by landscape architect Beatrix Farrand is featured in a new book

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller was the very model of a Yankee matron: God-fearing, unpretentious, civic-minded. “I am very much a New Englander,” she told her sons, “and won’t get over it.” That being said, the arts patron—she cofounded Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art and, with her husband, John D. Jr., restored Colonial Williamsburg—was an ardent Orientalist, amassing hundreds of Hiroshige woodblock prints and displaying Buddhas en masse amid clouds of incense.

Rockefeller’s grandest Asian investment was the private wonderland that landscape architect Beatrix Farrand created for her on Maine’s Mount Desert Island between 1926 and 1935. Open to the public a few days each summer and featured in photographer Larry Lederman’s new book, The Rockefeller Family Gardens: An American Legacy (The Monacelli Press), the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden evokes the Far East that its namesake saw in 1921, on her sole trip to that part of the world.

Chinese and Korean stone lanterns punctuate a mossy glade.

Larry Lederman/courtesy of the Monacelli press

Larger-than-life Korean dignitaries carved from granite flank the 980-foot-long Spirit Path, a domestic diminution of the four-mile road to China’s Ming Tombs. Standing in the sun garden is a Tang-dynasty shrine dated 784, and stone lanterns sprout from undulating carpets of moss. The Forbidden City’s pink walls sparked the garden’s own blushing enclosure, topped with thousands of imperial-yellow tiles that were recycled from the Beijing original. As for the moon gate that frames a gilt-bronze Buddha Shakyamuni, the Rockefellers’ Asian antiquities dealer sketched the circular design.

The Rockefellers’ 1921 trip to Beijing led them to pierce a wall with a moon gate; the flower garden, however, is entirely English in style.

Larry Lederman/courtesy of the Monacelli press

“Farrand had never traveled to Asia, and Abby Rockefeller spent only a few months there, so the garden is a work of imagination,” says Lederman, whose book also features the grounds of Kykuit, the family’s estate in Pocantico Hills, New York. “They knew it wasn’t authentic—at the center was an English-style cutting garden of summer-blooming flowers for the house—but those ladies didn’t care. It’s a genius conceit, and it absolutely knocks your socks off.”